Georgetown University, Washington D.C. December 2015. Who says global climate change isn’t real? 70 degrees on December 13? But it made for a nice normal walk… no negative interactions in three hours.

I walk bare-chested primarily because I enjoy feeling free. My strong secondary reason for walking bare-chested is to normalize female bare-chestedness, so that other women may feel the same way.

The only way to normalize anything is to do it with so much regularity and normality that people stop being afraid of it and start seeing it as conventional behavior. This is my motivation for posting photos and videos of my walks. I want people to see and hear for themselves the reactions (and more importantly the non-reactions) of the public as I walk by.

There exists this misconception that going bare-chested is some disruptive act of revolution and that traffic will stop and babies will cry. Perhaps…

St. Jones River, Dover, Delaware. Delaware law specifically forbids public female bare-chestedness, but not public male bare-chestedness, nor public breast exposure by transitioning people who have “female-looking breasts” but still have male genitalia

“Bare-chestedness may be legal, but a bare-chested woman can still be arrested for disorderly conduct.”

I hear this so much from police I have begun to anticipate the argument when I email them before a walk or bike ride.

Sometimes a police officer will initially deny the legality of female bare-chestedness but that usually goes away quickly when we look at the applicable statutes, because they are almost always clearly written.

But then, almost universally, that police officer will warn me about disorderly conduct or some equivalent charge, like open lewdness or public indecency. Having heard it so often, this is what I write now in my very first introductory emails.